Rigord & the Capetian Triumph in Normandy (original) (raw)
Related papers
“The World of the Early Capetian Court: 987–1180.”
Routledge Handbook of French History, Edited By David Andress, 2023
This chapter situates the growth of the first six Capetian kings’ authority within the wider social, cultural, and religious context of the royal court from 987 to 1180, a time of political decentralization. It examines key aspects of the Capetian court as a place of residence, government, judicial procedure, ritual, and patronage, as well as its changing relations with nobles, with other royal courts, and with the Church. Though the Capetians’ land holdings remained small compared to those of the territorial princes in this period, gradual changes introduced into the practice and ideology of rulership during the late tenth to twelfth century ultimately strengthened the Capetians’ hold on power and helped make further political consolidation in the thirteenth century possible.
The politics of being Norman in the reign of Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy (r. 942–996)
In 966, by the end of the reign of its third duke, Richard I, Normandy had overcome the crises that had beset it in the middle of the century. Much of this success came from the coherence of its ruling group, which expressed itself partly in terms of ‘Norman’ identity. This article uses Dudo's history of the dukes and Richard's charters to argue that ‘Norman’ as a political identity was a deliberate creation of the court of Richard I in the 960s, following the perceived failure of his and his father's policies of assimilation into Frankish culture.
and teaching purposes, and we request that all citations still be to the 2014 version published in History Compass. This longer version allows us to include a section on the relations between the University and the court (which had been cut in 2014 for reasons of space), and also to update bibliography through 2016. It should be noted that the updates are not systematic, but merely reflect areas in which we have been reading over the last two years. Abstract: The sharp ascent of Capetian power between the reigns of Philip II Augustus (r. 1180-1223) and Philip IV the Fair (r. 1285-1314) is an axiom of medieval French history. In the mid-twentieth century, French and American institutional historians focused on governmental developments in analyzing the means by which the Capetian kings increased their real authority. But because Capetian power was also understood to have rested as much on ideological claims as on brute force, twentieth-century historians from Marc Bloch to Joseph Strayer already recognized cultural components as crucial to this story. Consequently, later twentieth-century turns toward cultural history and post-structural theory did not so much undermine as open up new possibilities for this established narrative. Most recently, a sophisticated new brand of institutional history has emerged to further invigorate a thriving field, which defines Capetien power in ways that necessitate the inclusion of ideology, art, sanctity, gender, crusade, persecution, and intellectual authority in an overarching conceptualization of the period's political history.